“Free/Will”

The Devil Wears Prada:
Miranda Priestly:
‘This… stuff’?
“Oh. OK. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select… I don’t know… that lumpy blue sweater, for instance because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise. It’s not lapis. It’s actually cerulean. And you’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar de La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves Saint Laurent… wasn’t it who showed cerulean military jackets? I think we need a jacket here. And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. And then it, uh, filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and its sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room from a pile of stuff.”

That notion that your freedom to think, contemplate, or feel for yourself is not necessarily taken in the precise context in which it exists. Maybe this is exactly why the “Paradox of Choice” is prevalent in the human consciousness?

“What if your decisions were just a sampling from the stream of human consciousness…?”

Have you ever stood on the banks of a flowing waterway? That water rolling along the sloping geographic features that allow gravity to carry it from it’s beginning to end is a stream of H2O. Any sampling along the route will verify its basic chemistry, yet depending upon where you take a sample determines the variables connected to the underlying fundamental structure. Rock, soil, plant, and other living organisms affect the composition along this stream. Similarly, human consciousness is sampled in much the same way. Our ego loves to assign specific value associated with the self to this consumption of experience from the universal stream of consciousness. Thus, your reality is bound by the specific circumstances surrounding your place in time, not just simply your perception of opportunity.

“Herd’s lean in one direction so hard…they, can’t help themselves.”

So, if everyone is swimming in this stream of consciousness, how do we navigate through our time on the river? Navigate is the key word in this discussion. Whenever one finds them self immersed in a Navigable waterway, Navigation is the most important fucking attribute a human can possess! There are proven understandings of the universe, that when applied to Navigation give us tremendous predictability for what to expect. NASA followed a comet for 5 million miles, and landed a spacecraft on its surface traveling 40,000 mph! Physics is a very acceptable discipline by nearly all modern day homo sapiens. The capacity to Navigate through a lifetime (your slice of the universe) is within the realm of human understanding. We all have the ability to manage our lives (with a small percentage of exception), so let’s process that system.

What circumstances you’re born into is the starting point for this journey. Once again, you have zero control over that, so accepting this is everyone’s initial challenge. Luck is what placed you there, and unlike other occurrences luck doesn’t revert to a mean or trending average. It can stay amazing or shitty for as long as circumstances allow. Your role is to minimize the shitty part by making the best choices from your pile of options, and being thankful for the good outcomes, knowing they don’t have to always end up in your favor. You thought I was going to go into some mathematical charting of life, to make it easy for you🙄!